Thinkpads Forum

I have tried to play (using winxp with Media Player Classic - Home Cinema) 1080p movie (.wmv format) on my X60s machine through VGA output to 24" 1900x1200 monitor, without any success. Video jams and audio is wrapping. I can watch 720p .mkv file without any jams.
Specs are: Core duo L2400, 1GB of ram and some fujitsu-siemiens 60GB disk.
Will I be ok when upgrade to 2GB of ram, or this machine is just too weak to play 1080p?

Some x60s are WWAN ready. They have a second mini pci slot. There is a special card you can put in the pci slot which helps you with playing videos. I don't know the name of the card, someone else here can help out for sure.

My T60 is a T2400 and it can not display 1080p.

Try Here
http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?f=30&t=83880

Try http://www.bsplayer.com/ or http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

Maybe they'll be able to pull it off.

vlc and bsplayer didn't do the job. does x60s have two mini-pci slots? i think i'll just get this "broadcom crystal hd" card.

th1 wrote:Core duo L2400

It won't play 1080p.
Integrated GPU is poor too, so graphic acceleration won't work either.

Your only option is ViDock.

how about to uprade it to highest low-voltage x61s board? (Intel Core 2 Duo processor L7500 or L7700, Low voltage 1.60 or 1.80 GHz, 800MHz FSB, 4MB L2 cache)
should do the trick? i'm sure i'll also buy broadcom crystal hd card, but i'm curious that only upgrade to mentioned x61s will do the job?

th1 wrote:how about to uprade it to highest low-voltage x61s board? (Intel Core 2 Duo processor L7500 or L7700, Low voltage 1.60 or 1.80 GHz, 800MHz FSB, 4MB L2 cache)
should do the trick? i'm sure i'll also buy broadcom crystal hd card, but i'm curious that only upgrade to mentioned x61s will do the job?

It's going to be close. I'm guessing still no, even for the L7700.

See under the palm rest if you have two PCI-E slots.

I don't know how they compare, but my t61 with a T7100 (1.8ghz), 4gb ram and windows vista will run youtube at 1080p without issues (based on what its telling me - it looks no diffrent than 720p) - One thing I have noticed is that (in vista at least) the X3100 has decent acceleration, I can watch 720p youtube on battery with max throttling. I don't know if that transfers to anything else, I just thought I would share my experience.

thank you all for your help. i very like my x60s and i can say that i simply adore this machine. superb computer. i also plan to do some mods in future. on my list are: sxga+ (hv121p01-100) mod, swapping motherboard to x61 with new cooling module and paste, additional RAM, better wireless kit. and no, no ssd at this moment (i had a bad experience with ocz's vertex2. it just stopped working without a reason after 3 months). to this list i'm adding right now broadcom crystal hd mini pci-e card.
thanks a bunch for your great support as usual

craigmontHunter wrote:I don't know how they compare, but my t61 with a T7100 (1.8ghz), 4gb ram and windows vista will run youtube at 1080p without issues (based on what its telling me - it looks no diffrent than 720p) - One thing I have noticed is that (in vista at least) the X3100 has decent acceleration, I can watch 720p youtube on battery with max throttling. I don't know if that transfers to anything else, I just thought I would share my experience.

You should try a hi bitrate downloaded 1080p with good compression. I'm sure you will get dropped frames on your machine.

Yes, well yesterday I was playing with full HD on my machine, and it was about as painfull as watching youtube on an original pentium - I think I will stick with 720p (all I need - I don't have access to any full HD anything)

th1 wrote:I have tried to play (using winxp with Media Player Classic - Home Cinema) 1080p movie (.wmv format) on my X60s machine through VGA output to 24" 1900x1200 monitor, without any success. Video jams and audio is wrapping. I can watch 720p .mkv file without any jams.
Specs are: Core duo L2400, 1GB of ram and some fujitsu-siemiens 60GB disk.
Will I be ok when upgrade to 2GB of ram, or this machine is just too weak to play 1080p?

As someone above mentioned, the GPU is too old to play most 1080p videos. It has no problem with 720p though..

Instead of adding second mini-PCIe card I'd sell the laptop and buy X61(s)-series or newer model.

marYn wrote:As someone above mentioned, the GPU is too old to play most 1080p videos. It has no problem with 720p though..

Instead of adding second mini-PCIe card I'd sell the laptop and buy X61(s)-series or newer model.

And you think X61s can play 1080p video without a problem?

IvanAndreevich wrote: And you think X61s can play 1080p video without a problem?

Yes, I have owned X61 and during 1080p playback the CPU usage was quite low. Obviously GPU did lot of work. X61s has lower performance CPU than my old X61 but I'm quite sure it will work fine.

With such CPU low usage while playing 1080p is *NOT* possible. And no, integrated GPU is too weak to take over acceleration, so I think you got wrong movie or misunderstood it's parameters (no offence ofc ).
It would be nice if you could prove your statement - get ~12GB movie encoded in x264 with 1080p res, play it, film it and share the results here

I've got a Pentium 4 3GHz to play some medium bitrate 1080p videos without stuttering, surely a dual core CPU should handle most of these fine. What was important is selecting the right decoder - one that can use multithreading. In my case CoreAVC (with any player of your choice) did the job.

pit1337 wrote:With such CPU low usage while playing 1080p is *NOT* possible. And no, integrated GPU is too weak to take over acceleration, so I think you got wrong movie or misunderstood it's parameters (no offence ofc ).
It would be nice if you could prove your statement - get ~12GB movie encoded in x264 with 1080p res, play it, film it and share the results here

No offense taken.

The major difference is newer GPU - Intel X3100 is a huge leap compared to GMA950. As I wrote I had owned X61 (past tense), I can't do the test now. Anyway sometimes I play 1080p movies on Dell D630 - X3100 graphics with C2D 2Ghz processor and it works also fine. Whether it's Lenovo or not is not important Sorry, but I have no time to do tests.

Just try to use software codecs only and you will see how much work GPU does.


EDIT: some grammar :/

The case is the bitrate of movie.
My old lappy with dual core 1.73ghz and X3100 couldn't play smooth 1080p with bitrate around 8-10k, coded with x264 and with DTS audio in any circumstances.
DXVA - fail, no even video,
CoreAVC - a/v out of synth,
VLC - same as above,
etc.
Even gl acceleration under Linux couldn't help.

This is why in my opinion such systems are not enought to enjoy the *REAL* FullHD

Forgot to mention - another thing I found that helps a lot with performance on weaker systems - turning off Deblocking/Deinterlacing in CoreAVC. Made the difference between playable and unplayable in a few MKVs.